Moneyball Review

Posted by Jeremy Wilson on 09.24.2011

An epic tale of heroic underdogs: one a confident, handsome GM; the other, his nerdy, stat-spewing sidekick. Their mission? To challenge conventional wisdom, turn the tables on the big guys and save Ricardo Rincon from the evil clutches of the Cleveland Indians.

*Needless to say, spoilers are contained within this review. Look, this is a film based on real events and people. Specific scenes and events will be mentioned. If you don't want to know, read it later. If you don't care, read on.*

Directed by: Bennett Miller
Written by: Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin
Based on the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by: Michael Lewis

Billy Beane: Brad Pitt
Peter Brand: Jonah Hill
Art Howe: Phillip Seymour Hoffman
Sharon: Robin Wright
Casey Beane: Kerris Dorsey.
Scott Hatteberg: Chris Pratt
David Justice: Stephen Bishop
Ron Washington: Brent Jennings
Grady Fuson: Ken Medlock

Rated PG-13 for some strong language.
Running Time: 133 minutes




I know too much.

I can't speak to whether or not your view of Moneyball will hinge on how much you know about baseball itself. So I start this review by admitting my “bias” upfront. It was not and is not a bias for or against Bennett Miller's Moneyball. Critics and reviewers are supposed to be as “unbiased” as possible when reviewing films and I think it's only fair I give you as much information as possible. I love movies. I love talking and writing about them. I love film history and I love the technical aspects that go into making them. But my first love, is and always will be, baseball. I am biased in my love for baseball. I can't turn off what I know about the game, its history or my love for it. I recognize there are plenty of individuals out there who either don't care or don't know the game, and I will do my best to present this review not just for baseball nerds such as myself, but for you all as well. However, with all that in mind, I must say I was looking forward to the film version of arguably one of the three most important baseball books ever written.

I hate to be that guy. I wanted to like Moneyball as much as everyone else seems to like it. I wanted to lose myself in what Manohla Dargis (film critic for The New York Times) described as Billy Beane's “liquid physical grace and bright eyes of a predator” (whatever that means). I wanted a great baseball movie to join the ranks of films such as The Pride of the Yankees, The Bad News Bears, The Natural, Bull Durham, Major League, A League of Their Own and even the gooey, crowd-pleasing nostalgia of Field of Dreams. I wanted it to be as smart as it looked; I wanted it to be this year's The Social Network (which some have called it). Bennett Miller, Aaron Sorkin and Bad Pitt all involved in a movie about baseball? Count me in.

The problem is that Moneyball is not a good baseball movie. I'm not even sure I would describe it as a good movie, period. Sure, it's beautifully filmed and rousing in all the right places. But it is also a simplistic, contradictory treatise on a philosophy that no longer exists in the kind of pure form in which Moneyball presents it. What's worse, is that for a film that is trying hard (and occasionally succeeding) about getting certain events and details right, it laughably fails to do so most of the time. It plays too much with its own timeline in an attempt to keep Beane and Brand on a pedestal that as of the writing of the book, Moneyball, had yet to be truly earned. As it turns out, the legacy of Moneyball – the philosophy and its most strident proponents – is a bit more muddled.

For those who don't know the story: Moneyball is adapted from a Michael Lewis book of the same name, in which the front office of the Oakland Athletics (circa 2001-02) is forced to get creative in order to field a winning ball club. The film starts out with the final A's game of the 2001 playoffs, where they lose to the mighty Evil Empire (aka: New York Yankees) and are entering a free agency period in which they are going to lose three key players. The film's central focus is on the General Manager, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who has to make due with one of the league's lowest payrolls and a system that is heavily weighted towards big-budget, large market teams. During the offseason, Beane encounters “Google Boy” Peter Brand (Jonah Hill; a role based on Paul DePodesta) who convinces him that baseball thinking and player evaluation is medieval and that statistics are a batter way of trying to uncover the kinds of undervalued, cheap players the A's needed to reform a winning team. The majority of the film traces the A's 2002 season as they start out poorly but go on to win an American League record 20 consecutive games until being defeated by the Minnesota Twins in the American League Divisional Series (first round of playoffs).

The first problem with Moneyball is that there is no big, happy Hollywood ending. There's also not a tragic ending. Or a poignant ending. Or much of anything powerful in its beginning, middle or ending. Instead, the closest approximation comes about ¾ of the way into the film with the A's breaking the AL consecutive wins record, when time itself seems to stand still. The movie, jauntily breezing through most of the season, slows down to magnify the importance of it all. But there are reasons that championships are the be-all, end-all in professional sports. The A's record is nice and is worthy of remembrance, but is it enough to act as the on-field anchor for an entire movie? I don't think so. Arguably one of the best scenes in the film (and more accurate) is right after the A's break the record. Beane doesn't look happy and Peter Brand doesn't understand. Beane explains to him that the only game that matters is the last game. The old guard will jump at the chance to whitewash the A's accomplishment if they don't win a championship. He's right of course (other than the fact there was a book and film about it all). The film is book-ended by disappointing losses in the playoffs, arguably as much a hallmark of those “Moneyball” A's teams as the philosophy itself. There is no real cinematic beginning, middle or end, because in reality, there was no cinematic-quality beginning, middle or end. Contrary to necessary Hollywood alterations, the 2002 Oakland Athletics were not much of a surprise and were not the Bad News Bears. The (white) elephant in the room when it comes to this movie is that they could play ball, and they had a bunch of talent still left over from that 100-win season the year before. Movies play with facts and change things to suit cinematic necessities. Of course I know this, but few films are presented as a generally truthful telling of real events such as Moneyball. The Social Network did all of this as well. However, that was a multi-faceted film encompassing many different themes and characters, dressed up as a modern legal thriller. What kind of movie, exactly, is Moneyball?

Yes, the A's are the plucky underdogs of this story, with Billy Beane and Scott Hatteberg as its heroes. But Beane isn't on the field and Hatteberg is a secondary player. This is when the “baseball nerd” in me takes over. Trust me when I tell you that the Oakland Athletics did not win over 100 games because of Scott Hatteberg, The film glosses over this, as well as simple counterarguments to its message and philosophy. The fact that Oakland had 3 of the 10 best pitchers in baseball at the time, including the 2002 Cy Young Award winner Barry Zito, is never mentioned. The fact that while Scott Hatteberg may have worked better for Oakland in 2002, Carlos Pena would be the better long-term option at first base is ignored. The 2002 American League MVP – Miguel Tejada – apparently does not exist on the A's team in this Moneyball universe. The simple fact that Jeremy Giambi had been an Oakland Athletic for two years already instead of being traded for by Beane that offseason is just flat-out wrong. Giambi was infamously involved in one of the worst A's memories/games in recent history, as he failed to slide to home plate to avoid Derek Jeter's (shortstop for the New York Yankees) tag in the 2001 ALDS – a scene that opens this very movie.

Which leads into another issue with Moneyball – the contradiction inherent in its premise. The importance of Moneyball to the game was not because it proved you could field a winning team with defective players or an extremely low payroll. Moneyball was simply a business strategy. It was a way of looking at statistics to find overlooked and undervalued nuggets. Moneyball was and is important because it showed the game there was more than one way to look at things. It instilled in baseball an acceptance of creative thinking when evaluating players and teams. The film touches on that, but more often than not, chooses instead to act as if sabermetrics and the Beane/Brand way is only right way of doing it. It chooses to lampoon anyone who disagrees with the Beane/Brand way of thinking and completely disregards and omits certain facts along the way. One of the most cringe-worthy scenes is early on in the film at the beginning of the A's off-season, as Beane sits with his scouts and talent evaluators. Most of them are extremely old and spewing ridiculous notions of why a certain player would or would not make a good ballplayer. As Beane looks on, tired and agitated, this over-the-hill group of old guys are trying to decide whether a player's ugly girlfriend is a sign – one way or the other – of things to come in his playing career and mental makeup. Obviously, this is played up for cinematic reasons, but this is essentially the only thing discussed at the table. While some of this went on throughout the history of baseball, it still presents everyone but Beane as a complete idiot, instead of having a truly compelling or electrically charged (and even) battle over talent evaluation.

There are very few more revered figures behind the scenes of baseball than scouts. They are essential to the game; they do a ton of travel and work and there are just too many players out there for one or two men to spot. Even Billy Beane respected scouts – he WAS one for heaven's sake – but unfortunately, the film picks up one of the worst aspects of the book, which was its biting disdain for scouts and “old-timers.” Granted, some of this was justified, but many of them had spent their lives in the game; they knew talent and potential and did their best to identify and acquire it. The fact of the matter – and this is something Moneyball the movie doesn't have a great respect for – is that luck plays more of a role in the game than we tend to give it credit for. That applies to every level – from on-the-field performance, to acquiring and signing players, to the minor leagues, scouting and player development. Intangibles don't easily fit into computer models and sabermetrics.



Another problem is that Moneyball (the book) and the philosophy of using sabermetrics seeks to strip the romanticism out of the game and out of the evaluation process. So I find it slightly ironic that Moneyball (the movie) revels in it. This is a film that romanticizes the unromantic and is openly manipulative about it. I have a great respect for Bennett Miller's talents as a director; his 2005 masterpiece, Capote, is an unbelievably powerful and nuanced film. However, for this film, direction is laid on so think it suffocates the movie at times. The film is gorgeous to look at – the cinematography by Wally Pfister (The Dark Knight, Inception) is beautiful and very effective – but Miller's direction feels fragmented and start-stop in its pacing. It is also long, running at over 2 hours with a lot of meandering and filler, creating some flat-out boring stretches. Whether its the extreme closeups (including one to conclude the film that isn't nearly as emotionally powerful as Miller wants it to be) or the slow motion baseball action (does a walk still count as action?), Miller would have been better off if he focused more on characters and relationships, some of which are quite interesting in reality versus their cinematic equivalent.

So what's good in Moneyball other than beautiful cinematography? The leads for one. The performance of Brad Pitt basically makes Moneyball watchable. He's at his charismatic best here as Beane, and he deserves credit for working hard to try and get the look and feel of the man right. Jonah Hill as Peter Brand is inconsistent at times, but for the most part plays a good sidekick to Pitt. When Hill is allowed to just start talking or when he's able to let his comedic timing loose he provides some of the biggest laughs in picture that can actually be genuinely funny. When he's forced back into being the overweight, mousy, standard stat geek who is afraid of the players and scouts, it's less effective.

While those two are good, the rest of the cast are disappointing, including a completely wasted performance from Phillip Seymour Hoffman as A's manager Art Howe. Baseball fans know of Beane's (and the A's) disdain for managers, but what could have been a complex, electrically tense relationship is instead flat, with Hoffman giving a one-dimensional performance of a character that is written as one-dimensional – which is too bad. Robin Wright and Spike Jonze are wasted as Beane's ex-wife and her new husband, while Kerris Dorsey is delightful but wasted as Beane's daughter, a role and side-plot relationship that feels shoehorned into the film. The Juno-inspired song sung by the girl and barely-there tear from her father doesn't help and feeds into the idea that it's all just a bit manipulative (not in the normal movie way) and disingenuous.

I have a great respect for the impact that sabermetrics and Moneyball have had on the game. It has shifted the debate and changed the talking points – baseball fans now know WAR, slugging %, WHIP and the almighty on-base % as much as they know the traditional wins, batting average and ERA. It also became a part of every Major League Baseball team's front office in one shape or another. But if Moneyball the book helped usher in a new era and heralded a new way of thinking, then Moneyball the movie feels late to the party and like its trying too hard. The passage of time is a funny thing, one which baseball has always understood better than Michael Lewis or Bennett Miller's Moneyball does. The sport is a marathon not a sprint. The philosophy has had a muddled legacy, one stemming from the Oakland Athletics' own downward trend and the newfound openness in baseball to look at things different ways. Moneyball and sabermetrics are part of it, but no one still believes they are the solution. If this film came out 6 years ago, perhaps it would feel different. Unfortunately, Jeremy Brown (the heavy-set catcher who hits a home run, trips around first and doesn't realize he hit it out) did exist, and while the film plays him up like Beane and Brand may have found the next Babe Ruth for the A's, the fact is that he is the face of Moneyball's failures. Failure or mistake is something Moneyball doesn't seem to want to admit.

As it stands, it is a grand cinematic treatment for something that I'm not entirely sure deserves it. If they had focused on creating a Billy Beane character study, more reminiscent of what The Social Network did with Mark Zuckerberg, it might have worked better. The problem is that they didn't, and while Beane is the most fleshed out character in the film, it's still not much, especially in regards to relationships (family and work). I would have been interested to see more of the Billy Beane journey from talented prospect with little confidence to the uber-confident General Manager of a small market team he became. When talking about Moneyball, I had to ask: What exactly, is on the line here? Why are there no developed characters other than one? And is Brad Pitt talking on the telephone, the best this film has got? Yes this film has a certain realistic melancholia (especially beginning and end) and effective behind-the-curtains look that you don't often see in sports movies. I'm not saying I need The Blind Side (another Michael Lewis sports book) but is that refreshing melancholia and earnestness enough? Sometimes things don't translate well from the page to the screen. In my opinion (and trust me, I know I'm in the minority on this) Moneyball fits that description.

Jeremy Wilson can be found on Twitter @Jpwilson1984 or reached by email at [e-mail]

The 411: Moneyball is not a bad movie, but its not a good one either. Brad Pitt is great, the film looks gorgeous and it can be genuinely funny at times. But for film-goers – whether they be baseball geeks or not – serious flaws become evident. For a film based on real events and people, it is frustrating in how remarkably sloppy they are with the details. Bennet Miller's direction is not great; the pacing is choppy, the running time is overly long (probably 25-30 minutes) leading to some boring stretches and unnecessary sentimentalism runs rampant in a story about trying to strip romanticism and sentimentality from the behind-the-scenes evaluation of the sport. Characters other than Beane are one-dimensional and it all plays out like an ideologically one-sided mock-umentary at times. It all looks good and there are talented people involved in this film. Many will like Moneyball and I know I'm in a very small minority. So, as always you should see it for yourself and make up your own mind. I'll be in the apparent 2% of people who didn't like it. Not Recommended.

Final Score:  6.0   [ Average ]